LiveEO: Copernicus Triple – From Idea to Market Leader

Start-up of the Month: LiveEO

October 2018

LiveEO is a space start-up that makes use of public and commercial satellite images and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data to monitor large-scale infrastructure grids in the verticals energy, railway, oil and gas. LiveEO’s solution is already helping Deutsche Bahn (Europe’s biggest transportation company) to prevent storm damage in the near future. The solution has great potential to save hundreds of millions of euros every year. Providing answers from above, LiveEO integrates satellite-derived data and predictions directly into business processes. The method enables data-driven decisions from the daily work of inspection teams up to yearly strategic manager decisions. With the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), LiveEO gives insights and geospatial answers about the present, past and future. The growing team of ten employees combines the knowhow of space engineers, computer scientists, geo experts and business engineers to build a scalable product. LiveEO’s ambitious goal is to monitor every infrastructure grid on the planet on a sub-daily basis in order to take care of the backbones of our modern society. With this approach, LiveEO is now in a market-leading position within the German railway domain and will be targeting more verticals and regions in the next few years.

Copernicus Triple

It all started as an idea at the space network NewSpaceVision in Berlin. Here, the founders Sven Przywarra and Daniel Seidel organised events to raise awareness of the space industry. In May 2017, both came up with the idea for LiveEO and decided to participate in the Copernicus Masters and the European Satellite Navigation Competition (ESNC). Both competitions helped the entrepreneurs to specify the concept and to build a first prototype. Winning the Copernicus Masters “Earth Observation Challenge for Digital Transport Applications” and two 2nd prizes at the ESNC in November 2017, LiveEO received a great deal of attention. After winning the Copernicus Masters Challenge, the start-up was eligible to participate in the Copernicus Accelerator programme. The great support from their mentor Hinnerk Gildhoff, who works at SAP, took LiveEO to the next level and improved the founders’ understanding of the Business-to-Business (B2B) software model. With the reputation of the Copernicus Masters and Copernicus Accelerator, LiveEO became involved in an SAP pilot project and also won several prizes outside the space industry (“Atomleap High-Tech Accelerator” and “BMWi Gründerwettbewerb”). Another important milestone was the selection as one team for the first batch of the Copernicus Incubator – completing LiveEO’s success in a Copernicus triple. The financial support from the Copernicus Incubator sped up the development of a market-ready product. Within a few months, the team has grown from two to now ten employees and has multiple clients purchasing LiveEO’s innovative analytics solution.

Venture Capital to Become Europe’s Leader in Space Data Analytics for Infrastructure

Starting as just an idea, LiveEO is now a solid and successful business with constant revenue growth. However, to become an industry leader in such fast-growing environment, LiveEO had to undergo a finance round within the last few months. By the end of 2018, the company aims to receive seed funding from strategic investors in order to enter international markets with its finalised B2B core product. “In the coming years, LiveEO wants to be a European counterpart to the dominating venture capital-backed data analytics start-ups, which are mainly located in the US.” LiveEO is also working on an ESA Business Application proposal to receive more financial support to reach its objectives.

“LiveEO delivers answers from above in a disruptive way, which is highly relevant for the SAP business world. By combining satellite imagery with UAV data, its solution perfectly fits the goal of the brand new SAP product HANA Spatial Services: an open and extendable cloud platform to derive information out of Earth observation and drone data to improve business decisions. A first successful proof of concept with a customer in the energy market already shows the potential of the combined solutions. With this, a platform for start-ups and commercial partners that paves the way into the world of enterprise business is created.”